The Jared Chronicles | Book 4 | The Devil's Bastion, page 13
part #4 of The Jared Chronicles Series
John couldn’t see it, but he felt Barry suck the air out of the atmosphere, nearly creating a vacuum around the two men.
“What are you talking about? Let’s get the hell out of here,” Barry hissed, a little too loudly for even John’s liking.
“Quiet down, or you’ll get us both killed,” John returned in as quiet and authoritative a voice as he dared considering their close proximity to the enemy.
Barry sat back, staring into the darkness, actually really scared for the first time in a while. When he’d been a small boy, his father had taken him to a graveyard on Halloween when he was ten years old, a sort of rite of passage. Barry had been determined to accompany his father right until the time they arrived at the giant gothic-looking gates. He’d told his father he wanted to go back, and surprisingly enough, his father had nodded his agreement with the young Barry’s wish to RTB or return to home base, only something was off about the look on his father’s face when he assured Barry going home was absolutely fine with him.
Barry’s father told his son he was welcome to walk back home alone in the dark while his father went on. Already scared half to death, the thought of returning home in the dark by himself frightened Barry more than touring the graveyard with his father, so he’d stuck to his father’s side like Velcro, enduring fatherly hazing. This particular evening found Barry, although older, in the exact same predicament. He wanted to return to the ranch, but the likelihood of his stumbling headlong into a patrol wasn’t just probable, it was damn near inevitable. Goddamn it, he swore to himself; he’d have to stay with John. The alternative was just too darn scary or risky or whatever.
Slowly, Barry pulled out a poncho liner and tried his best to curl up inside it. The things seemed to have been manufactured for a military full of men and women under five feet in stature, resulting in either Barry’s feet or part of his neck and chest always being exposed to the crisp night air. In the end, he kept his boots on, establishing a tight seal around his neck just under his chin. This small inconvenience was yet another of his new life’s modicums of comfort. He never seemed fully satisfied in any part of his life anymore after the solar flare had stripped humanity of most of their creature comforts.
John also pulled out his poncho liner, only he flung it around his shoulders, trying to enjoy its insulating powers as he kept a vigil while Barry tossed and turned next to him. John heard men moving through the area at one point and sat frozen, willing Barry to remain quietly asleep. As the men drew closer, John coiled his legs under himself and slid his knife from its scabbard. Gunfire, even suppressed gunfire, at this proximity to the base camp would mean John and Barry would have enormous problems. Sunrise was quickly approaching, so running wasn’t on the table, and since it appeared to be a ten-to-one ratio from what John could tell so far, he and Barry would fight, be quickly overrun, and die in place.
John sat as still as a statue as the men passed his location and moved off into the darkness of the early morning. When the sounds of the men’s footfalls were no longer battering John’s eardrums, he let out a long exhalation and pulled the liner tighter around his neck. He held the knife for another ten minutes before returning it and pulling his rifle around to his front. He’d been about to wake Barry before the men dropped in on them, but now he doubted he could just lie down and fall asleep.
John leaned over anyway and gently touched Barry’s shoulder. Like most people who were still alive after the solar flare altered the course of humanity, Barry didn’t jump to his feet; instead, his eyes opened as his brain scrambled to make sense of his surroundings. People who leaped about when woken got themselves killed in these new and trying times. It was better to remain perfectly motionless until a person figured out an intelligent course of action based on their environment.
“Wake up. I gotta sleep for an hour or two. Wake me when the sun comes up if I don’t get up on my own,” John rasped in a voice hoarse with fatigue and a little dehydration. “Also, there are guys walking around out there, but don’t worry—we’re right in the middle of their camp, so it’s to be expected,” John announced quietly.
Hearing John’s voice helped bring Barry’s brain fully online as he turned his head in John’s direction, and he blinked while fear tugged at his conscious at hearing what John just said.
When Barry didn’t reply, John jabbed him with a knuckle. “Bro, you got it?” he pressed, wanting to lie down.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m up,” Barry breathed in an airy voice heavy with exhaustion and a touch of irritation.
John made no effort to continue the conversation as he rolled over onto his side, wrapped his hand around the sling of his rifle in case someone tried taking it, and tried forcing himself to sleep. At first his mind raced with thoughts of their upcoming day and how things would play out. John was well aware of operations where men were inserted into an area under the cover of night, only to wake and find the cover they thought they had was all but nonexistent under the scrutiny of daylight.
John was moderately sure they wouldn’t run into the same problem when the sun lit the area, due to the thickness of the brush they were secreted in. Slowly his mind slowed and with it his heart. Muscles relaxed, and much quicker than John could have hoped for, he was asleep on the ground, his cheek resting in soft soil not more than half a kilometer from Carnegie’s base camp.
Barry sat erect in the still cold morning air, searching mostly with his ears since it was nearly impossible to see through the thick layers of leaves and branches of the brush he was hidden inside of. If he tilted his eyes to the skies, he could see the faint traces of the coming morning. Not quite light yet, but definitely not the dark-as-ink sky of several hours before. As light shot out across the land from the east, Barry wanted to shake John awake, but stopped himself. Barry recognized John was a little more than a security blanket while outside the wire, so to speak. John was Barry’s lifeline when the two were out in the countryside, far from the safety of the ranch, protected by the sheer number of people living there who wielded weapons.
Barry was a thoughtful enough man to also realize John was human just as he was and was likely as or more tired after all they’d been doing the past week. The more rest John got, the more capable he would be to detect and deal with a threat to both himself and Barry. In the end, Barry allowed John to sleep well past the early morning and into what could be called breakfast time, or leaving-for-work time had it been a year prior.
Barry’s chest tightened as the first sounds of activity drifted down from the base camp, men stomping about, looking for proper spots to relieve their bulging bladders, hollers from other men issuing orders and arranging the day’s operations. It was all very unnerving for Barry, but he held fast, listening to the base camp coming to life and watching John’s peaceful face as the man breathed in and out in a rhythmic cadence, communicating his exhaustion to Barry.
With a start, John opened his eyes, not moving his head, but searching his surroundings to the best of his ability given the restricted mobility of his eyes without the aid of John moving his head. Catching sight of Barry calmed John’s racing heart slightly, allowing him to turn his head to perform a perfunctory visual sweep of their sleeping quarters before rising to one elbow.
“I said get me up when the sun hit,” John croaked.
Barry nodded, then tilted his head from side to side and shrugged. “Yeah, I know, but you needed the sleep.”
John couldn’t argue with that, and the extra rest felt like it was proving a good idea on Barry’s part, as John gradually brought all his systems back online, scent—yep, he and Barry needed to bathe. Sight—his eyes were fully focusing now. Hearing—yep, the base camp was loud enough to be heard quite clearly from this distance.
“Anyone walk past?” John asked in a low voice.
Barry shook his head. “Only thing I heard was all the people over there getting up and yelling at each other.”
John pursed his lips, then rubbed the back of his head. “You can rest if you want. I am going to crawl around and find a good spot to observe from,” John informed Barry.
Barry pulled the liner tighter around his shoulders, not bothering to lie down, while John stowed his liner and pulled out his binoculars. Dragging his rifle and carrying the optics, John slid on his hip through the brush in search of a proper OP or observation point. They had a great listening post, but just not a great line of sight on the base camp. John figured he could stand up and see over the top of the brush, but decided that was a dandy way to get skull capped by some soldier with an itchy trigger finger.
Bit by bit, John pulled, clawed and wriggled his way this way then that until he came to an area likely used by coyotes for bedding down at night. The earth was powdery like talc, with the area ten feet across and all of six feet in width, with a slight indentation into the ground. From this depression, John was less than twenty feet from the edge of the brush line. The manner in which the brush grew afforded John several windows and a direct line of sight toward the base camp.
“Bingo,” John murmured to himself, drawing the binoculars to his eyes. He scrunched his nose, fighting off the urge to sneeze, as he focused the optics on the camp five hundred yards away. The trick to a good hide was to insulate one’s self through a number of screens. This meant John was behind several various-shaped portions of the brush and bushes, but was able to make out the base camp, which was out in the open. Alternatively, someone looking his way from the base camp would only see the dark outline of the brush he was cloaked in.
John had learned the art of concealment during his tenure at the Marine Corps Scout Sniper Division School at San Onofre, when he’d been relatively new to the Special Missions Unit. Although the Marines were hailed as the crème da la crème in the sniper world, John’s former unit used the Marine’s sniper school as a kind of indoctrination, or warm-up to their own in-house sniper school training. After all John had endured getting himself to the Special Missions Unit, the Marine Corps Sniper School wasn’t all that demanding, allowing him to focus on the more technical part of the art, which was paying off today.
As the details of the base camp poured through the optics into John’s eyes and were fed into his analytical mind, he was astounded by the rapacious efforts on Carnegie’s part to exact some level of revenge against him. John could clearly count at least thirty men, which meant the number was much higher. Considering Carnegie would not only have stationary sentries out, but roving patrols as well, told John the number was much higher than thirty.
Try as he might, John was unable to locate either Josh or the colonel inside the camp. This was most likely due to the back section of the camp not being visible to John. From what he could tell, there would be no way to see the entire camp from anywhere inside the thicket he and Barry were holed up in. It was what it was, and John would have to make do by using tactics he’d been trained to use, used in combat, and had success with.
John spent the remainder of the morning with a small pad of paper, sketching out Carnegie’s base camp’s layout. The sketch included guard posts, tent positions, vehicle locations, and even the latrine’s position outside the main encampment area. Although John wasn’t able to identify each soldier, he was able to get a rough count during the few hours he spent studying the camp.
Finished with the observation and sketch exercise, John slithered back to Barry, who sat atop the poncho liner, wearing a worried look on his bearded face.
“You eat?” John asked in a hushed whisper. He hadn’t eaten before leaving Barry earlier and was famished.
Barry gave a slight twitch of his head in the negative, making John wonder what in the hell Barry had been doing the entire time John was out watching the base camp. Now wasn’t the time or place for long drawn-out conversations with quirky people he didn’t understand or relate to, so John opened his pack and pulled out a handful of dried venison and some trail mix. Barry followed John’s lead, and together the two men from two very different pasts ate in silence.
When John finished dining, he left Barry again to slither off to the south in order to get a sketch of the soldiers’ positions that overlooked the ranch. The soldiers were dug into fighting positions, nothing that surprised John since this group of soldiers was what was tantamount to a blocking force, insulating the base camp from a direct attack from the ranch. John surmised Josh had other groups of soldiers on his flanks that could be called to action if needed.
The second sketch only took an hour of John’s time, after which he scanned for other fixed positions. He found several other fighting holes filled with men and women, bringing his total troop count well past fifty. John’s mind began to realize he would need to thin Carnegie’s numbers before the colonel was allowed to unleash an unbridled assault on the ranch. John guessed he would need to reduce Carnegie’s numbers by at least twenty in order to give himself and his friends a fighting chance when Carnegie dropped the hammer.
Based on what John had seen so far, Carnegie had learned a lesson when dealing with John and the SEALs. This time the old bastard wasn’t taking any chances by sending green troops out into the night against an experienced fighting force. John could tell the colonel had simplified his approach by outnumbering his opponent five to one. Overwhelming the ranch was Carnegie’s plan, nothing fancy, lots of casualties on his side, but in the end, he’d stand victoriously on the Thackers’ front porch.
John couldn’t allow that to happen and needed desperately to come up with a plot in which John killed off close to forty percent of Carnegie’s manpower. A feat easier said than done, John knew, but a deed that had to be accomplished nevertheless. John’s first instinct was to skulk about in the night, slitting throats and caving in heads, but he quickly benched this approach. He would get a few, this was fact, but the moment the alarm sounded, letting everyone know there was an aberration out in the darkness stealing souls, John would be running and fighting for his very life.
No, John needed to come up with a better and more decisive plan, a strategy to remove as many soldiers from the playing field as possible in a very short span of time. If Carnegie felt he was slowly hemorrhaging soldiers, he’d pull everyone back and unleash Josh on the problem. Josh was a very dangerous chess piece to have roaming about the board unaccounted for.
Lacking the formula to strip Carnegie of twenty soldiers, John crawled back to where Barry was lying on his back, staring at the clear blue afternoon sky.
“I’m gonna sleep for a few,” John announced quietly as he withdrew his poncho liner and curled up in it.
“When should I wake you?” Barry asked, not bothering to get up.
“Dark,” came John’s muffled reply.
“Why’d I even come out here with you, man?” Barry whispered in a voice slathered in incredulity.
John lay still for a moment before rolling onto his chest and rising on both elbows. “You wanna die alone, Barry, die in the dirt somewhere with strangers standing over you, the same ones who are the reason you’re dying?”
John didn’t wait for Barry’s answer, both men knew a rhetorical question when one was posed. John’s was a query needing no answer. “Well, neither do I. It’s why we travel and operate in pairs or even larger groups; no one wants to die out here alone,” John ended, shaking his head and lying back on his side.
Barry stared back, blinking at the savage, which was how he usually viewed John, lying in the poncho liner, telling him he was along so the man didn’t have to die alone. The statement served to both surprise and unnerve Barry. He’d never contemplated John being scared of anything, and the fact that John just admitted he’d forced Barry along in case he was killed caught Barry off guard. What scared Barry was that even John needed a security blanket and had in fact brought one—Barry.
John rolled back over, pulling the liner close around his head, and drifted off without another word, leaving Barry sitting in stunned wonderment. Barry remained vigilant throughout the remainder of the day, and when the sun sank to the west, he shook John awake. John sat up, rubbing his bloodshot eyes, and motioned for Barry to grab some sleep. Barry already wore the poncho liner around his body and had only to topple to the side, find a comfortable or at least a less uncomfortable position, and drift off.
As Barry tried falling asleep, the sounds of the men outside the brush haunted his mind. There were so many, and they seemed well organized, with vehicles, defensive fighting positions, and roving patrols. All day, Barry had been so focused on staying out of sight and keeping quiet he hadn’t allowed his mind to wander to the day this well staffed and highly organized group of men and women would march down the hill and try killing everyone from himself to Essie and Salvador.
Maybe when he got back, he would pack his things, take his motorcycle, and just get out of the area, separate himself from John and Jared. This thought, although enticing, didn’t have a long-term success plan like the ranch had given him. If he were to leave, he couldn’t later return to the ranch if John were able to pull off some type of miracle. Skinning out when the community needed him the most would make him a pariah. He would be a societal castoff, cursed to living off the land and by himself. There had to be a better more long-term plan, but for the life of him, Barry couldn’t think of one.
While Barry lay in the dirt, filled with anxiety while internally fussing over ways to survive, John sat stoically next to him, perplexed by his own seemingly insurmountable hurdle of reducing Carnegie’s troop count by nearly half. Meanwhile all around them, the enemy slept, worked, and lamented their own problems.
Chapter 13
The night’s cool air rustled with a slight almost imperceptible breeze that gently shook only the smallest pieces of vegetation, making little to no sound. Night was upon the land, and even the larger mammals moving about were doing so quietly. John flexed his shoulders, which no longer were cloaked in the poncho liner, and hefted his rifle to his right hand, poking a sleeping Barry with his left index finger. Barry stirred, propped himself up on an elbow, and began the process of untangling himself from his own poncho liner.
